Procrastination points

   One of my personal guidelines is that if I finish a project that has been subject to procrastination, I give myself extra points. I'm not sure what these points are good for but it's a lot more fun than beating myself up for taking so long. I just finished a Fair Isle sweater that I started a 17 months ago. I hereby give myself lots of points!

   The pattern is my own. I first tried out the colors and flower pattern on a tam. I love trying to mix in a few surprise colors like the rust and a bright dark pink. I prefer shading effects in the two color ribbing.  

  I decided to make the sweater as a rather fitted cropped jacket. This is the first Fair Isle sweater in which I have I shaped the arm holes so the sweater is a bit sleeker. 

 The knitty gritty: The yarn is Jamieson and Smith two ply jumper weight knit on 2.5 mm needles (US 1.5). To figure out the armhole shaping I referred to Alice Starmore's Book of Fair Isle Knitting and found a sweater using about the same number of stitches as I needed. The body was knit with steeks for the armholes and the front. After knitting the body and cutting the steeks, I picked up stitches around the arm hole for the sleeves and knit down until the sleeves were long enough for me. The front bands and cuffs were knit on 1.75 mm/US 00 needles and have facing knit on size 1.5mm/US000 needles. Maybe that's why the closer I got to the end of the sweater, the slower it seemed to go.

A small selection of insects

  I find insects quite fascinating. That's a good thing for anyone that lives in the tropics because there are a lot of insects about. (I had less positive feelings about the scorpion in our bathroom last night, but that's a different story.) On a recent walk in the Santa Elena reserve, we saw several particularly interesting insects. First was this pair of dung beetles rolling their ball of dung along the forest floor. They were in the cleared area next to the path, heading for a dead end with a 10 cm/4 inch cliff looming ahead so I used a leaf to transfer them over to the leaf litter farther from the trail.

Then we saw this very large insect trucking along at a phenomenal rate of speed. A friend who knows about such things said it is a species of cerambycidae or long horned beetle. Note for future reference: beetles with long antennae are likely to be cerambycidae. This one was over 10 cm. or 4 inches long.

Morpho butterflies are quite easy to see in many places in Costa Rica including Monteverde. Their iridescent blueness and their crazy flight pattern never ceases to lift my heart. It's quite unusual to see one perched with it's wings open. Usually you see the camouflaged under wing.

Moths, on the other hand, are often sitting around waiting to be photographed during the day while they sleep. I like this subtle elegance of this fuzzy individual.

 I wish I had some fabric printed with this this motif of  spots within circles.

The best thing about looking for insects in the tropics is that you never know what you will see next because there are so many different species.

Two variations on a theme

   My most recent temari combine the threads I bought in Guatemala with colors ideas I got there. This ball is sitting on the table runner (a former huipil or traditional blouse) that inspired it.

The stitch is kiku or chrysanthemum stitch. It's a great stitch because it's much easier to do than it looks. This thread, being size 8, is finer than what is often used for temari and while it took longer to stitch, it let me get more detail on the ball. It's like having a higher resolution TV. Having done this ball on a green base, I decided to use the same colors on a black base.

First I stitched with colors going from light in the center to dark at the outside. On the other side I reversed the color order, although I still outlined with a dark color.

What different effects one can get with the same colors. It's one of the things that makes stitching temari fascinating. I had lots of space around the equator so I tried a more elaborate obi than I usually do. It uses the same colors and is two sets of kiku stitches overlapping at the equator.

I like looking at these two balls together to see how much you can do with the same set of colors.

Bling

I'm not much of a collector (I like to think. But how did all that stuff get in my house?) One collection I have is of beaded hair clips from Guatemala. My very first one was of a hummingbird. I wore it so much it kind of fell apart. This is its replacement.

Now that I know that hair clips don't last forever, I'm always on the lookout for new ones. The amazing thing about Guatemalan crafts is that every piece seems to be different. Other than their beauty, the reason I need hair clips is that it is sometimes so windy in Monteverde it's that or go insane from hair whipping around my face. Or get a buzz cut. So I let my hair grow longer than I normally do and clip it.
   On this flower I love the shading on the leaves and the use of the longer green beads.

This butterfly hid one of its antennae during its photo shoot.

On my last trip to Guatemala I found out that hummingbirds clips are rare now. I saw hundreds, if not thousands of hair clips—all different—but not another hummingbird I liked. I did find a completely new style of clip which has embroidery enhanced with beads. The shop owner told me it was of a woodpecker, but this species is only found in the imagination of the artist.

Now I'm thinking about how beads could be added to temari.

Size matters

   I recently stitched two balls of very different sizes with the same design and it's interesting to see how different they look. The design is Interlocked Puzzle in Temari Techniques by Barbara Suess. The directions call for a 32 cm circumference ball but I happened to have a 45 cm C10 ball sitting around so I used that. (It's the bigger ball in the photo below. ) It looked a little sparse so I used one more row in each shape than Barb called for.
   Then I decided to stitch a smaller ball and used one with a 30 cm circumference/3.75". I think they make a nice pair because I used blues and greens in both. Using a dark thread to mark the ball made a difference; those lines are much more prominent in the smaller ball because of the contrast with the base thread.

Most colorful nation?

I wonder if anyone has ever ranked cultures by how colorful they are. Surely Guatemala would be at or near the top of the list. Not only do many people in the highlands still wear their traditional and very finely crafted garments, there is a plethora of colorful textiles and other souvenirs for sale. On our recent trip there, one of the pieces I bought was this beautiful table runner made out of a slightly used huipil or traditional blouse.

I not only bought textiles; I bought some number 8 mercerized cotton embroidery thread in the Panajachel market. These ladies, in their beautiful huipils helped me with some color suggestions. Mr. Rududu is such an enabler: he told me to buy one of every color the seller had. I was slightly more restrained than that because I was thinking about how heavy my carry-on luggage was already. Interestingly, this kind of thread is a fraction of the cost in Guatemala compared to what it costs in the US.

My thread looks like a boxes of candy. I've already started stitching temari with it.

The other side of the ball

   One of the fun things about stitching temari is that not all sides of the ball can be seen at once. If one doesn't do so well on one side of ball, it can be displayed with the preferred side visible and the other side as unseen as the dark side of the moon.
   I just completed a 16 face ball with kiku or chrysanthemum stitch in the four hexagons and the other shapes filled in with swirl stitch.

I tried both solid color swirls as above and swirls where I lightened the color as I got close to the center of the shape as in the next picture.

I enjoy trying different color combinations of different sides too. (Perhaps I just have a low tolerance for boredom.) I also tried different greens with the same blue on the various kiku sides.

This was my favorite color combination.

The colors of this ball were inspired by a little bird found in Monteverde. While not extremely rare, it's very difficult to see because it hides in clumps of mistletoe high in trees. It's the Elegant Euphonia (euphonia elegantissima).

The nitty-gritty: I learned how to mark this ball by following a tutorial in the Temari Challenge Yahoo group. The marking is called C8 to pentagons and hexagons. The 16 faces consist of 4 large hexagons and 12 pentagons. Thanks again to Joan Z., who led the tutorial.